Quatrain

Love Sharon Shinn, but this book....

Just made me want her to stop futzing around with novellas and write a full length novel again. Seems like she's been writing mostly YA lately, and I miss her Adult fantasy/fiction.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

These are four great fantasy novellas

"Flight". Living in atonement for her sins, Aunt Salome protects her niece Sheba from the dark archangel of Samaria Raphael as she knows first hand his temptation.

"Blood". Seventeen year old Kerk Socast leaves the Gold Mountain to find his mom in the Lost City with the help of Jalciana Candachi.

"Gold". Her parents send Princess Zara from the war to live with her Uncle Jaxon in Alora. Later after it is safe, she refuses to go home to Castle Auburn as she prefers living on the other side of the River Faelyn as there her love for her restrained guard Orlain can flourish.

"Flame". The untrained reclusive Mystic Senneth knows when she uses her gift; the headache and other pains leave her believing she is cursed. She meets the villagers at a gala that her friend Evelyn insists the too tall big boned hermit attend. However, soon afterward, the villagers realize she has the gift of the magi with her skill to call and put out the fire. However that condemns her as flames burn down the village.

These are four great fantasy novellas that showcase the talent of a wonderful author. It's a sin if you have not read Sharon Shinn.

Harriet Klausner

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

Only recommended for Sharon Shinn completists.

This was a deeply disappointing collection for me. It doesn't work for two reasons. The first reason is that the initial volume in any of Shinn's series always blows me away, then each successive volume is only half as good as the one before. Two of the four novellas in this volume are set in the worlds of Shinn's two longest series, and those two novellas have reached only homeopathically good territory. The second reason is that I just don't think Shinn is capable of writing stories with the sort of thematic freight she attempted here -- the two non-series novellas are drawn from two of her more message-heavy novels, and the two series novellas attempt to address some of the seriously thorny issues inherent but not really addressed in her previous world-building.

Still, it's the sort of volume that if you are a Sharon Shinn completist, you simply have to read it. And since her prose is always pleasant and easy to read it goes very, very quickly.

Flight--
This was by far the worst story in the bunch. It features the return of Raphael as the Biggest of all Big Bads, doing evil just because he can; a really, really, really clunky and histrionic speech about the evils of a system where women are only valued because they can produce angel babies; and a completely forced romance. I rather wish I could erase my memory of it.

Blood--
The novella too features some clunky speachifying on the evils of a patriarchal system, but there is a greater focus on the budding friendship between Kerk and Jalci, a very Hollywood but still somewhat heartwarming set of scenes at a sort of shelter for abused women and their children, and an actual honest-to-goodness moment of heartbreak and moral ambiguity. That moment gets completely ruined a moment later when Jalci recasts everything as black and white, but it made the story worthwhile for me. I think this was the best of the bunch.

Gold--
I think this novella would actually work better for people who have not read the novel. If you have not read the novel, it's a fairly straightforward story about the dangers of living in fairyland -- not a particularly memorable entry into that canon of literature, but I happen to like those stories with their depictions of dangerous beauty. If you have read the novel, as I have (though not tremendously recently), something about the story just doesn't quite seem to match what came before -- I spent the whole time trying to figure out what on earth happened in the interim to twist the recurring characters' motivations to this result. The story also featured a tremendously whiny teenage girl protagonist, and again the romance seemed forced.

Flame--
Senneth is my second-favorite of all of Shinn's characters (right after Jovieve in Wrapt in Crystal) and Shinn went a fair way to ruining her for me in this story. Here she is wishy-washy and whiny or self-righteous by turns. Because of the difference in her character, I assumed that the story was set several years before Mystic and Rider; I would believe that this teenage Senneth would grow into the wonderful Senneth I so loved. Unfortunately, Shinn then made it explicit that Senneth went straight from the events of this story into the events of Mystic and Rider, so my interpretation was invalidated and I was left feeling merely annoyed. Plus the resolution was completely predictable (which is problematic because the story is a pseudo-mystery rather than a romance) and again there were far too many soapbox mo

Quatrain

Nice way to re-meet characters from some of Shinn's series.

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